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On the alienation of academic labour and the possibilities for mass intellectuality

As one response to the secular crisis of capitalism, higher education is being proletarianised. Its academics and students, increasingly encumbered by precarious employment, debt, and new levels of performance management, are shorn of autonomy beyond the sale of their labour-power. Incrementally, the labour of those academics and students is subsumed and re-engineered for value production, and is prey to the twin processes of financialisation and marketisation. At the core of understanding the impact of these processes and their relationships to the reproduction of higher education is the alienated labour of the academic. The article examines the role of alienated labour in academic work in its relationship to the proletarianisation of the University, and relates this to feelings of hopelessness, in order to ask what might be done differently. The argument centres on the role of mass intellectuality, or socially-useful knowledge and knowing, as a potential moment for overcoming alienated labour.

3.
An HE policy narrative with two functions:
1.the fetishisation of human capital; and
2.the proletarianisation of academic labour
An HE policy narrative that:
1.frames the internalisation of performative responses; and
2.catayses academic and student ill-health or quitting, and in
particular of a rise in anxiety.

5.
competition instantiated through metrics and league
tables dominates academic labour time, such that
academics have increasingly little control over the
surplus time that the University demands from them
the social tyranny of exchange-value
Wendling, 2009, 52

7.
1. reports of adjunct professors who “don’t even earn the federal
minimum wage” (Saccaro 2014);
2. struggles led by postgraduate researcher-led committees in the
form of fair pay and labour rights (CUPE3903 2017);
3. quitlit reports of academics leaving the profession (Morris 2015);
4. self-imposed overwork as a culturally-acceptable form of self-
harm (Hall and Bowles, 2016; Turp, 2001);
5. reports of the suicides of those who are classified as precarious,
or for whom status is being removed (Hall, 2017); and
6. networks reporting on casualisation (CASA 2017).

8.
Hegel (The Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807): Entausserung or self-
externalization or renunciation; and Entfremdung or estrangement
(Spirit’s becoming other than itself in the realm of objectivity).
Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity, 1841): human’s projection of
her own essence onto an imaginary deity.
Marx (EPM, 1844); Marx and Engels (German Ideology, 1846):
Veräussern (Entäussern and Entfremden), on the state of being
alienated , dispossessed, sold, or estranged; fremd (on its own, as in
fremde Arbeit), focused on alien labour, or 'foreign', 'strange', 'unrelated',
or 'belonging to another’.
Lukács (History and Class Consciousness, 1923): “reification”
(Verdinglichung, Versachlichung); labour activity confronts human beings
as something objective and independent, dominating them through
external autonomous laws.

9.
[illness/precarity, labour rights, money, value/surplus-value,
labour-power, private property, alienated-labour]
alienated-labour as the key to understanding the ways in
which capitalist society mediates our activity, with a focus on
their overcoming
In alienated labour a social relation between people appears
in the form of the subordination of a person to a thing. This
social relation is the relation of private property, in which the
capitalist appropriates the means of production as his private
property, so permitting him to subordinate the labourer to his
own will.
Clarke, 1991, 52

10.
the alienation of the academic labourer from:
1.her labour-power, which is made precarious as it is sold in
the market;
2.the products of her labour, which are financialised and
marketised for their exchange-value rather than their social
utility;
3.herself as she becomes a self-exploiting entrepreneur; and,
4.her humanity as a species-being, reinforced through global
competition.
Marx and Engels, 1846/1998

11.
Weltschmerz
world weariness that lies beyond anxiety, anguish or ennui
a deeper sense of hopelessness about the academic project
hopelessness connected to a loss of autonomy/freedom
the cultural terrain reinforces within us a sense that we are not
productive enough, and that this is a sin

12.
When your ongoing employment hangs on the outcome of a
fellowship application that has a less than 20% success rate,
it’s easy to abandon self-care in favour of working nights and
weekends to increase your chances.
When moving interstate or overseas is the only way to
pursue your vocation, it’s hard to maintain a relationship or a
sense of self.
Almost every academic I know is either overweight, living
with a mental illness, or has an autoimmune disorder.
O’Dwyer, 2016

13.
The curriculum is white because it reflects the underlying logic of colonialism, which
believes the colonised do not own anything – not even their own experiences.
Implicit in the white curriculum is irrefutable evidence of white superiority as a matter
of truth and objectivity, while crafting a world-view that judges anything that it could
define as “non-white” or “other” as inferior.
‘Why is My Curriculum White?’ collective, 2015

15.
the accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of
the general productive forces of the social brain,
is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to
labour, and hence appears as an attribute of
capital, and more specifically of fixed capital
[machinery].
Marx, 1857/1993

16.
As intellectual workers we refuse the fetishised concept of the
knowledge society and engage in teaching, learning and
research only in so far as we can re-appropriate the
knowledge that has been stolen from the workers that have
produced this way of knowing (i.e. Abundance).
In the society of abundance the university as an institutional
form is dissolved, and becomes a social form or knowledge at
the level of society (i.e. The General Intellect).
It is only on this basis that we can knowingly address the
global emergencies with which we are all confronted [i.e.
through collective work/in the social factory].
The University of Utopia. 2015. Anti-Curriculum: A course of action. http://bit.ly/1qgEq8C

17.
the possibility of struggle and emancipation lies in the
autonomous organisations that exist within and between both
the factory and the community
with a focus on the forms of labour and the exertion of
“working class power… at the level of the social factory,
politically recomposing the division between factory and
community.”
Cleaver, 1979, 161

18.
In developing social use-value in teaching and research:
•extend democracy into/through the curriculum;
•uncover alienated-labour: private property; the division of
labour; and commodity exchange;
•eliminate the social division of labour between owners and
non-owners;
•less harmful relations of production;
•natural science fused with philosophy – inter-disciplinarity;
•global educational commons and critical pedagogy.

19.
Points of solidarity across the social factory:
•the embodied toll that neoliberal restructuring and austerity
takes on mental and physical health;
•the control of life-activity through debt, precarious
employment and performance management;
•the reduction of life to entrepreneurship and employability;
•the assault on social justice, and labour and human rights;
•issues of crisis concerning poverty, climate change, on-
going colonialism etc..

20.
On estrangement
That learning process comes easiest to those of us who also believe that our work is not merely to share
information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students.
To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the
necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.
bell hooks. 1994, 13

21.
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